A Short Guide to a Happy Life (2 page)

Get a life in which you are generous. Look around at the azaleas making fuchsia star bursts in spring; look at a full moon hanging silver in a black sky on a cold night.
And realize that life is glorious, and that you have no business taking it for granted. Care
so deeply about its goodness that you want to spread it around. Take the money you
would have spent on beers in a bar and give it to charity. Work in a soup kitchen. Tutor a
seventh-grader.

All of us want to do well. But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.

Live by the words of this poem by
Gwendolyn Brooks:

E
XHAUST THE LITTLE MOMENT
.

S
OON IT DIES
.

A
ND BE IT GASH OR GOLD

IT WILL NOT COME

A
GAIN IN THIS IDENTICAL

DISGUISE
.

Life is short. Remember that, too.

I've always known this. Or almost always. I've been living with mortality for decades, since my mother died of ovarian cancer when she was forty and I was nineteen. And this is what I learned from that experience: that knowledge of our own mortality is the greatest gift God ever gives us.

It is so easy to waste our lives: our days, our hours, our minutes. It is so easy to take for granted the pale new growth on an evergreen, the sheen of the limestone on
Fifth Avenue, the color of our kids' eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and
falls and disappears and rises again. It is so easy to exist instead of live. Unless you
know there is a clock ticking. So many of us changed our lives when we heard a biological clock and decided to have kids. But that sound is a murmur compared to the tolling
of mortality.

Maybe you have come to feel the way I have. And you've come to feel that way for a very difficult or demanding reason. One day
you were walking around worrying about whether you had anything to wear to a party
and reminding yourself to buy Kitty Litter or toilet paper. And then you were in the
shower lathering up, or you were lying on a doctor's table, or the phone rang. And your
world suddenly divided, as my world did many years ago. It divided into “before” and “after.”

“Before” for me was my freshman year of college, when I found myself able for the first time in my life to swear at meals and not be reprimanded, to go out at midnight and not have to tell anyone where I was going. “After” was the beginning of what would have been my sophomore year, when I found myself out of school, making meat loaf and administering morphine in a development house in the suburbs.

It is amazing how much you can learn in one year. Just like Paul, who was knocked off his mule into the dust on the way to Damascus, and discovered God, I had a
rude awakening. I'm not sure I learned anything much about mortality, or death, or
pain, or even love, although in the years since, I have found that that one horrible year has given me a perspective on all those things I wouldn't otherwise have had.

“Before” and “after” for me was not just before my mother's illness and after her death. It was the dividing line between seeing the world in black and white, and in Technicolor. The lights came on, for the
darkest possible reason.

And I went back to school and I looked around at all the kids I knew who found it kind of a drag and who weren't sure if they could really hack it and who thought life was a bummer. And I knew that I had undergone a sea change. Because I was never again going to be able to see life as anything except a great gift.

It's ironic that we forget so often how wonderful life really is. We have more time than ever before to remember it. The men and women of generations past had to work long, long hours to support lots and lots of children in tiny, tiny houses. The women worked in factories and sweatshops and then at home, too, with two bosses, the one who paid them, and the one they were married to, who didn't.

There are new generations of immigrants now, who work just as hard, but those of us who are second and third and fourth generation are surrounded by nice cars, family rooms, patios, pools—the things our grandparents thought only rich people had.
Yet somehow, instead of rejoicing, we've found the glass half empty. Our jobs take too
much out of us and don't pay enough.We're expected to pick the kids up at preschool and run the microwave at home.